So Apple acquired Shazam, what does that mean for the rest of us?
Just over a month ago, rumors were swirling around the future of Shazam. The London-based ‘name-that-tune’ app had a few buyers circling for a while including Snapchat and Spotify, but ultimately Apple was the one to put a ring on it (to the tune of $400 million).
Shazam has led a fairly quiet existence for nearly 20 years, almost pre-dating cellphones. No– we don’t mean you used a rotary phone to spin in your song — it just started as an SMS texting service to identify a song. It’s grown quite a bit since then really by becoming synonymous with music identification; managing to reach verb status in pop culture (AKA let me Shazam it quick…), and recently evolving into a super cheesy TV gameshow (yikes).
So what are the obvious changes to the app? First of all, any song you identify will now point directly to the Itunes store for a quick purchase. Fear not – as you are still able to click through and listen to the song with free sources, but the ‘vendor of choice’ will now be Apple. After meeting with some Shazam representatives and discussing the deal a bit, this is really the short-term win for Apple in the acquisition. A significant number of iTunes purchase traffic was coming out of Shazam pre-acquisition, so they wanted to ensure they owned that entire pipeline.
Beyond supporting the itunes pipeline, Apple likely made the purchase to own the future of identification/interactivity. Shazam’s product development path will eventually go well beyond just music recognition and into other mediums. Imagine shazaming 2-3 seconds of a movie or TV show and instantly knowing what it is. Even further – if you see someone eating a delicious slice of pizza and you were curious – just take a picture and Shazam will tell you. It definitely sounds creepy if you think about it, but that’s probably where the world is going.
Apple has been making large plays in the music business for quite some time. Starting back in 2002 with the acquisition of the Logic Pro/Garage band team, to the Apple music team to Beats by Dre; this is just another step forward for Apple in their quest for global music domination. Kidding of course, clearly they see more growth on the horizon (and maybe global domination). Who knows what’s next – maybe it’ll be a label.